Claiming the Title Kohenet: Examining Goddess Judaism and the Role of the Priestess Through Conversations with Contemporary Spiritual Leaders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the most exciting areas in both feminist spirituality discourse and Jewish religious practice are the reemergence of Jewish priestesses, kohanot, and the formation of a small, growing movement called Goddess Judaism, a term coined by Jenny Kien, author of Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism (2000). I include this worship of the Sacred Feminine as a key part of this piece because I have found that the role of a Jewish priestess is only supported by groups when the Sacred Feminine is revered and held as part of our concept of deity. In what can only be a brief overview of a rich and broad subject, this paper addresses some of the new research into the presence of goddess worship, and its ritual functionaries, among Semitic peoples in the Ancient Near East, ranging from the Fertile Crescent to Canaan to Carthage. I also discuss contemporary goddess feminism and new practices combining Judaism with feminist spirituality, as forms of both worship and resistance to prescribed roles in a traditional religion. This resistance—and a creative insistence on egalitarian inclusion—manifests in debates around public worship by women’s prayer groups in Israel, and can be seen in the growing number of women rabbis and others taking spiritual leadership roles in the United States. I also look at women-centered midrashim--reinterpretations of canonical and apocryphal legends; empowerment of Jewish women’s personal and religious lives through creation of new rituals, and writing of new liturgy and sacred texts. Finally, I look at how women have incorporated the Sacred Feminine into their spiritual practices within existing Jewish frameworks, as well as the ways they handle opposition and derision of their ideas and practices. The paper will conclude with an assessment of shifts in consciousness in the Academy and the community brought about by this movement, and its impact on the liturgy and services of traditional religious institutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".